2010 wrap-up and thanks

Charleston — In South Carolina, we truly live in interesting times. Whether that’s a curse or a blessing is a matter of opinion, but there’s no question that our state is a world leader in interesting.

This week we rolled out our annual Discusties awards, honoring the five people who had the biggest impact on our state. These aren’t necessarily the people we would have liked to have had the biggest influence, yet there they are. In case you missed them:

There are a lot of other notables that didn’t quite do enough to make the list, such as our outgoing Lt. Governor or a certain midlands state senator that throws racial epithets around, but we can’t include all of them, so better luck next year.

As for theDiscust, it’s been a pretty good year. Real work intervened and we weren’t as prolific posting as we would have liked to have been, but real work pays better than this does, so we’re not complaining. We averaged about 180 visits a day in 2010 and got some good coverage in the Charleston City Paper and an unexpected reprint in The State newspaper of an entire piece nearly verbatim (no, they didn’t ask first, but it’s cool, at least it was attributed — I can’t find it anymore on their site but here’s the original). That was my personal favorite piece we did this year, and while it didn’t get the kind of traffic some of our more sensational offerings pulled in, it got the kind of attention we like.

Also, we introduced an occassional new twitter feature for those times when we have a good idea for a story, but don’t have the time or energy to actually write it. You’ll find them under the #fakeSCheadlines hashtag. My favorite (from primary night): McMaster: “Who do you have to f*ck to get coverage in this state? Oh, right, Haley.”

So that’s it for 2010… but 2011 looks promising with a whole new batch of GOPers in charge in Columbia, the Civil War sesquicentennial, and of course all those presidential hopefuls that will be crisscrossing the state kissing asses and babies. Should be fun.

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